The AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, on the outskirts of Brussels, hosted an event on Saturday dedicated to researching the provenance of its collections.
This initiative is part of the museum’s PROCHE project, which collaborates with institutions like the Congolese National Institute of Museums (IMNC) to trace how artefacts arrived in Tervuren. Over the past few years, more than 83,000 objects have been identified as originating from Congo or Central Africa.
The research focuses on the individuals involved in acquiring these items to reconstruct their journey to Belgium as accurately as possible. Investigators aim to determine if the acquisitions were made by soldiers, scientists, missionaries, colonial administrators, or art dealers, and what role they played in the process. Businesses and religious congregations also appear to have been significantly involved.
So far, researchers have identified around 2,300 names of people or institutions linked to the over 80,000 objects. Most of these individuals, approximately 1,000, are tied to just one object each. Others are associated with multiple objects, sometimes dozens, while 123 people are connected to collections of between 100 and 1,000 objects. Eighteen individuals are linked to more than 1,000 objects.
